Blog 13
Those pictures below is our storyboard for Old Town Road.
Filming Reflection
We had an initial music video plan which is the “sunroof” we also did a rough cut about that music video. It took a long time to finish that video. We are filming in Sanya and it took 1 week. As the style of that song was happy and cheerful, the style of the music video seems like a vlog. We did lip syncing in that video most of the time and also use some cool filming techniques to make sure it’s diverse. Especially the swimming pool shots was amazing. But finally we change the idea to “old town road”
We managed our time very well so we finished the shoot in just one day. Our shoot was on the 8th of March. As our music video involved horses, vicky and I went to learn how to ride horses two days beforehand and got a lot of knowledge.
We shot in a horse farm in Beijing, and the scenes in the video were all set in the horse farm. We started with a scene in a hayloft. It was done quickly because we used a fixed camera position for some of the shots. The next scene we shot was with the horses, and tyler helped us set up the camera while I was shooting with vicky on the horse. At the end when tyler was caught as a thief we found a place that looked like a prison and filmed that part.
We didn't change too much when we shot it, but there was actually an earlier sequence where vicky and I travel back in time to the cowboy era, and we didn't cut that in because of the length. This has given me experience on how to control the timing of our video. I should have calculated the time needed for the original video in advance, so that there would be less unnecessary work.
Planning is very important for live-action shooting. Because we did a very detailed job on the storyboard, there were no unnecessary shots during the shooting. In my opinion, it was a good experience.
The whole music video is three minutes and twenty seconds, which is just under the required time, but if we look at the content as expected, it's over four minutes. The time was not what we expected, but the content and the story and the way it was shot was what we expected.
We all had different jobs in the group, I was in charge of the mise en scene, bought everyone's clothes and researched the period costumes, and I was also in charge of shooting Vicky's solo shot. I also did the digipak CD of the song. vicky was mainly responsible for finding our venue and post-editing. tylers were the actors in our group. But we all help each other out, come up with ideas and get things done together.
The shoot was completed in one day because we had done a good job of prep. The time management was very good throughout. Our mise en scene was also very well prepared. The costumes for each character were well prepared.
We used all the shots we took, only the out-of-time front narritive wasn't in our use. It was about Buzz Lightyear giving us a 'mission'.
I love each of our shots because they are all well planned, and the natural lighting of this shot below is something I really like. It is both a very beautiful shot and has a sense of hope.
There is another shot where we have used editing to change the colour of the trees behind us, following the music jam.
Most of our shots were based on the storyboard and because it was the whole story it needed to be connected very smoothly.
I think the most important thing we can improve on is the lip syncing of the characters, we should be more proficient in remembering the lyrics so that we can shoot more smoothly. Especially when it comes to complicated lyrics. Just a little bit of mis-syncing can be seen in the final edit and screening, and the mistakes are magnified a lot. There was nothing in the shots we took that I particularly disliked. But all the shots should have a little more camera work to enrich the image. For example, zoom in when a character appears or tilt up or down when a scene is shot.
At the end we just cut out the Buzz Lightyear shots that were out of time in the editing. Because of the length of the scene and the fact that the story could have been told without explanation at the beginning.
I don't think our filming was a success but it wasn't a failure either, there are still a lot of things that need to be improved and fixed. But the process is going well.